scholarmcp

Exposes academic paper and scholarly document search through the Model Context Protocol, allowing LLM agents to query academic databases and retrieve full-text or metadata results. Implements MCP's resource and tool abstractions to standardize how AI systems access scholarly content without direct API integration, using a server-client architecture where scholarmcp acts as the protocol bridge between Claude/other LLMs and backend academic sources.

Registers academic search and retrieval operations as MCP tools with standardized JSON schemas, enabling LLM clients to discover available search capabilities (e.g., 'search by keyword', 'fetch by DOI', 'filter by publication date') and invoke them with type-safe argument validation. Uses MCP's tool registry pattern where scholarmcp defines tool schemas that Claude and other LLM clients can introspect and call with structured parameters.

Streams scholarly document content through MCP's resource protocol in chunks, allowing LLM clients to retrieve large papers incrementally without loading entire documents into memory or context windows. Uses MCP's resource URI pattern to reference documents and supports partial content retrieval, enabling agents to fetch abstracts, sections, or full text on-demand while managing token budgets.

Abstracts multiple academic data sources (PubMed, arXiv, CrossRef, etc.) behind a unified MCP interface, allowing clients to query across sources with a single tool call. Implements source-agnostic search and result normalization, translating source-specific APIs into consistent JSON schemas that LLM clients can consume uniformly without knowing which backend provided the result.

Enables agents to navigate citation relationships between papers, extracting references from a paper and recursively fetching cited works. Implements graph traversal patterns where scholarmcp maintains citation relationships and allows clients to explore 'papers that cite this work', 'papers cited by this work', and 'related papers by co-authors', using MCP tools to expose graph navigation as composable operations.

Provides author and institution metadata retrieval through MCP tools, allowing agents to fetch researcher profiles, publication histories, and institutional affiliations. Implements author disambiguation (matching 'John Smith' across papers) and institution normalization, returning structured profiles with publication counts, research areas, and co-author networks that help agents understand research context and credibility.

Computes semantic similarity between papers and clusters results by research topic using embeddings or topic modeling, exposed through MCP tools. Allows agents to find 'papers similar to this one' or 'papers in the same research area' without explicit keyword matching, using vector similarity or LDA-based clustering to group related work semantically rather than syntactically.

Extracts and normalizes publication metadata (title, authors, abstract, publication date, journal, volume, pages, DOI) from heterogeneous academic sources into consistent JSON schemas. Handles format variations across sources (e.g., different author name formats, date representations) and validates metadata completeness, allowing agents to work with standardized paper records regardless of source.

Implements full-text search across paper abstracts and full text with support for advanced filters (date range, author, journal, publication type, citation count), exposed through MCP tools. Uses inverted indexes or full-text search engines (Elasticsearch, Solr) to enable fast keyword queries combined with structured filters, allowing agents to narrow results by multiple criteria simultaneously.